Monday, August 14, 2006

SpongeBobbery

I’ve been remiss. I haven’t posted about SpongeBob lately. Time to rectify that omission because, if this site is anything, it’s a chronicle of things seen (note title), and boy do I see a lot of that cheerful yellow bastard.

I don’t mean the cartoons, either, though lately we had a rental disc pass through our DVD player. I mean objects. For instance, we picked up a SpongeBob artifact in Canada. Somewhere we bought a couple of boxes—one for each child—of dipping-crackers-and-cream, an insidious product with crackers and cream each in separate sealed pods of a single container. Don’t know them? They’re marketed at little kids. Fun to open, fun to eat!

In this case, it was little chocolate crackers shaped like SpongeBob characters, paired with vanilla cream. On one side of the box there was an illustration of SpongeBob with text in English; the other side had the same pic, but with French. From the French side, I learned that he’s Bob L’eponge, “Bob the Sponge.” I’m not conversant in French, but my guess would be it might take a half-dozen words to render “SpongeBob SquarePants” in that language and it would still be inelegant, so they dumped the reference to his clothes. Of course, the name isn’t very elegant in English, but elegance isn’t an essential feature of the character anyway.

Our backyard faces Lilly’s elementary school, and so a variety of balls make their way over the fence. Sometimes, especially if there’s kid asking for it, we return the ball over the fence, but at other times there’s no way to know whose it is, so we keep it. Recently, a yellow volleyball-sort of ball (softer than a real volley ball) came to rest in the yard. It was beaten up and all its design except for two eyes rubbed off. And you know whose eyes those were. So did Ann. There it was, a yellow ball with two eyes and nothing else, and she said, “SpongeBob!” Gee.